inclementimmigrantHelldivers 2 and Palworld devs wish players understood that 'easy' additions and updates are sometimes really hard: 'That's half a year's work. That takes six months'
Well in Helldivers 2s case, its not helpful that they picked to use a dead game engine. Autodesk Stingray has been dead for a while.
Also, I might agree except that solo indie devs in their basement can add many basic features in 6 months time, not just one. I get that some features, like new maps, mechanics, or characters take time. But for example, when a game mechanic already exists elsewhere in a game but not in a different part (for example, a flashlight attachment on one gun but not a different gun), there is not a thing in the world that will convince me that would take 6 months to add. And if it would take 6 months to add, that is entirely due to laziness or incompetence.
Sounds to me like you’re not considering that they likely have a massive list of priorities to address and a flashlight attachment is simply not even close to the top of the list.
Nothing exists in a vacuum.
It was only an example. As the asset already exists in the game elsewhere, adding that same asset somewhere else in the game should definitely not take even an intern more than a week to implement.
Again, it is understandable in certain circumstances that major content drops take time. But for something as simple as the flashlight attachment example (which again is only a hypothetical example), there is no excuse for something like that to take 6 months or more to implement. Even if they have other priorities, something like that is so menial to implement that it would not take any significant amount of time away from higher priority development. Particularly because, in the example, other guns already have flashlight attachments, it already exists in the game. Unless they programmed the game in the literal worst way imagineable, they likely have a modular weapon system with slots that accept attachments. Very easy to add a new slot and allow it to accept the flashlight attachment, again as an example.
I think you’re misunderstanding the concept of priority.
a big part of the complexity in programming (especially game programming) comes from balancing flexibility with speed (both implementation and performance). At some point, decisions are made weighing out risks, priorities and plans that will solidify a part of the code base in favor of speed (or some other factor) at the cost of flexibility.
this happens all the time
A lot of the reasons a solo dev or modder seems like they can progress so fast changing things is they aren’t facing a lot of the same factors and they aren’t needing to go through any rigorous testing.
At some point in the process, there’s too much risk and and overhead involved to make any change. This is totally normal from triple A down to game jams.
And, you can’t ignore that some of these things come down to game design. A change like you’re suggesting, just adding a light, can negatively affect the balance of things even if it seems like it wouldn’t.
“Our software is a bloated mess” is not the defence they think it is.
BigFigDoesn’t seem to hurt Bethesda. Oblivion remaster drops and the Internet ate that shit up like the pile of old shit it is.
It kind of is, unfortunately. Games are often developed with a lot of pressure and the constant dangling of the budget being cut off. I don’t think the devs are incompetent and think what they produced (code quality wise) would be the best, but what could they do if they need a result to present to the publisher end of week and then don’t get money (aka time) to clean it up but instead they get the next deadline.
On the other hand I am also not sure I can blame publishers. Things can easily spiral out of control if managed badly in the other direction… see Cloud Imperium Games (i.e. Star Citizen).
AsimovIVI am not a game dev and do not have a stake in this personally but also dislike the ‘lazy or incompetent dev’ line that gets used sometimes. While ALOT of games seem to be made with really shitty code, with a game that seems as complex as Helldivers 2 adding a new feature can be a lot more complex than expected.
First there are non-technical factors: bosses that might not want to implement the feature and needs to be convinced, the devs might not know how to implement it and need to do research which takes time, artists that need to be added to the pipeline for assets, budget or other financial concerns (management might not think the feature will contribute to revenue), or even something like petty internal politics.
One the side of technical problems there is combinatorial explosion where adding ONE feature means thinking about how it interacts with all the other features. There is the problem of possible technical debt where you might inherit bad code from previous devs that you need to change before you can add anything. There is also the problem that the feature might not be technically feasible; remember that a game has only a fraction of a second to do its calculations and display them to the player while also checking for player input. This does not even begin to consider the problems caused by being a multiplayer game with possible network problems.
On the discontinued engine, the studio founder said that they were already in development of Helldivers 2 when it was discontinued according to the Wikipedia article.
Yeah I agree this seems more like tech debt and possibly a shitty architecture to me, both problems that ultimately come from poor management. The codebase I’m responsible for at work was developed in a mad rush, and the levels of pointless coupling and interdependence sometimes makes it hard to change anything without spending forever tracking down all the stupid little places that piece was touching. That shit comes from management pushing you to just do the thing already and move on, which works for a while until things get so messy you have to slow down or spend some time on a refactor. Someone could easily have made a technical decision for the sake of expedience, which was then built upon and became interconnected with other things in a way that made changing it require a major change, which of course no manager will support, so the work gets broken up into 100 tiny stupid tickets trying to move toward adding the new feature without ever making a breaking change, slowing down the whole thing even more.
QuadratureSurferSure, larger businesses have more developers to get more work done. But there comes a time when throwing new developers at a problem convolutes the process and actually slows things down more than it helps.
Something that seems simple to you like a flashlight attachment may not be so simple under the hood.
Solo indie devs have an advantage because they’re familiar with all of the code. They’re the ones that wrote it.
They don’t need to learn a new part of the code when making fixes or changes. They don’t need to explain to another dev that “you don’t change how this information is passed in here because you’ll need it to look just like that in some other section that you’ll never touch”.
Additionally any decisions/changes/etc. are all decided by one person, no need for meetings to get everyone on board and explain exactly what you want to do. No need to try to get everyone to understand your vision for what you want to happen.
A famous comic might explain this process a little better:
Working as a solo dev on a project you know by heart is literally the easiest work to do. If you’ve never had to work on a large old codebase you have no idea just how hard it can be to make changes.
I’ve done this sort of thing for years and I would not even give an estimate on a change for a new project without some time to look at the code base.
Maybe the suits can fix that in a week by using AI.
/s btw
Hey ChatGPT, code a new island!
Players: it’s not unique enough and that makes it boring. It’s like they rushed this one with some standard stuff.
beanI own something from that. I tried running it once and it would barely load. I gave up. Didn’t try again even on a new pc
I bought a pledge early on. Sold it a few years later for double the price. Great investment!
players? you mean marks
Ricky RigatoniDon’t compare actual games to scams.
I mean, it really depends on how you define scam. If you’re so loose with the definition that you would have considered No Man’s Sky a “scam” when it first released, then I can understand that.
Otherwise it’s not really a scam. There’s a free trial going on right now in Star Citizen.You’re free to check out the game for yourself. It’s in a really good state compared to what we’ve previously seen (not even close to bug free, but way more playable than before).
DonebrachBut like, the commercial said that making games is just sitting on a couch and pressing a sound board to add that one sound effect in level 3, so like I don’t know why they want money for it.
Lol if gamers are bitching about a game not adding a whole new island, you should ignore them because they’re clearly idiots.
If gamers are bitching about your menu system being navigable by someone with less than an a PhD (cough, Risk of Rain 2 on console, cough) then if it takes 6 months to fix thats because you coded your software badly.
That’s right. Still, it could take more than 6 months to make it right.
No doubt.
I like to link them to any modding SDK (official or unofficial) and as them why don’t they make it.
Well for one they’re a consumer who paid for a functional game. Nobody expects drivers to break out power tools and mod their car right off the lot.
It’s even more embarrassing when modders do fix it. Some random guy with no source code access manages to fix an issue in 3 weeks that a whole team couldn’t fix in 3 years.
simplecough, Risk of Rain 2 on console, cough
I still remember when they somehow broke the Xbox version and nobody could get past the start menu.
I had to read an article about that. It apparently coincided with the release of the second DLC. It was pretty broken on PS5 as well. That just screams some high level exec said it MUST be out on the announced date cause they told someone that it would be. Likely part of a contract or their bonus was tied to it. Doesn’t matter if it’s unplayable. It ‘met’ the release deadline. Now we’re just ‘doing maintenance’.
I’m a dev and I firmly believe that if people could see the software they use daily as a physical object like a car…they’d be more “Hell, no. That’s a death trap” than they probably realize.
6 months doesn’t sound unrealistic for re-doing a menu system. Designing, reworking art, re-programming workflows and then testing everything can take several months. Even just the logistics of releasing it after it’s done, that alone can take a month.
Yes, it is possible to setup everything in a very generic way that is data-driven, but that also is a lot of work that has to be prioritized with the scope of the project and the team members available.
it is possible to setup everything in a very generic way that is data-driven, but that also is a lot of work
Sure, but it can also be reused in future games. Separate styling from behavior and you can make it look unique for every game with minimal code changes.
Alternative reasons (not mutually exclusive):
- The organization has outdated policies that make delivering changes difficult.
- The systems used in development and delivery haven’t been invested in enough to automate repetitive steps, optimize workflow, and increase safety of changes.
Again, complex changes are obviously going to take more time, but if the simplest changes take significant time or effort then something is wrong.
SorteKaninmenu system
I think you are vastly underestimating how complicated menu systems and UI in games are. I have a friend who works as a professional game developer in a small studio and far as I heard, he’s spent most of his time just working on their UI/menus.
Changing these things is neither easy nor fast.
Correct. Once again, Gamers take developers for granted because something LOOKS like it’s simple, but it rarely ever is. It’s hella frustrating to deal with this every day as a dev, but I guess that’s what you sign up for in this line of work.
The ROR2 new game menu has only a few elements:
- Character select
- loadout select
- difficult select
- artifact select
- DLC select
That’s it.
I know it isnt completely trivial, but as someone with many years of experience making (small) indie games, I know for a fact that a menu like that is only changing a few global variables. It’s a frontend with very little backend to consider.
Something like that is not a year’s work. I could agree with a month, and even at that, most of it will be testing, not design.
And tbh - the main problem with it isn’t even its design (the design is fine) just its controls. You inexplicably have to use the D-pad for character select, but the analogy stick for everything else, apart from switching to difficult select with R2. Why not navigate the whole menu with either D-pad or left stick? That should only take a week to fix at the absolute maximum, unless they’ve managed to tie the code in a spaghettified knot that’s unnecessarily coupled with actual game mechanics.
AAA gamedev here. I agree in principle with the gamefeel critiques, but I’d like to bring up that scale absolutely matters here. You should know as a guy who works in the space that every degree of complexity your codebase adds can cause cascading issues, which is one of the million reasons indie devs are told to keep their game scope small.
Scale absolutely matters, but the scale of the new game screen is (or should be) very minor compared to the game itself. That one scene should only be setting the variables for new play, not interacting with anything outside of it.
And, to be clear, the main concern is simply the input handling in that scene. The UI itself doesn’t really need to be changed, just which buttons change the highlight focus.
I can imagine it was likely thrown together quickly, perhaps with some unnecessary coupling, or maybe reading the inputs using action names that also relate to gameplay, so it becomes awkward changing it out.
I’m not so experienced with Unity, but in UE and Godot, adding and mapping inputs is fairly trivial - select the “up” button and map it to “ui_focus_up”, etc. I can’t see it being much more complex in Unity.
If you’re spending months on your menu system, you’re doing something wrong. Bang it out in a few days and revisit just prior to launch. It’s really important because it’s the first thing players use, but it can also be overhauled late in development because it doesn’t impact much.
I would understand if it was a complex in-game menu system for a grand strategy or 4x game or something, not for a game launch menu. Get your UX team to iterate a bit during development and have devs throw it together once the major features are ready and it’s mostly time for bug fixing and polish.
revisit just prior to launch
This is simply not feasible - menus include pause menus, talent trees, inventories, all that kind of stuff. All of that is necessary for proper gameplay testing. You can’t just “bang that out in a few days”.
I’m sorry, but this idea that any of this is easy enough to do in a few days and not crucial enough to iterate on throughout development instead of just doing it at the end, is exactly the kind of naive attitude that the Helldivers and Palworld devs are talking about.
menus include pause menus, talent trees, inventories, all that kind of stuf
Right, which is why I specifically said there’s an exception for menu-heavy games like 4x and grand strategy. If we’re mostly talking about launch and pause menus (which was my intent), that’s a small scope of work, as in weeks, not months.
You can absolutely build that in a few days, and then redo it later once UX has decided what needs to go there. It’s pretty similar game to game, so build it properly once to be data driven, and then tweak the UX and options a bit for each game. Optimization is generally done pretty late in the dev cycle, so those options don’t need to exist until later in development anyway, and that’s like half the work.
The important thing is to have your UX team iterate on it before your devs get involved, so it’s ready. And have them build it out while optimizing things for release. Your menu systems don’t need a ton of testing relative to the actual mechanics and gameplay.
killeronthecornerDescribing design problems and attributing them to “bad code” is part of the problem tbh. The issue in your example started long before any code was written.
dumblederpMy Helldivers gripe is that the war bonds cost too much for the casual player. 1000 super credits takes a while to gather, and even grind. Paying actual money for them is about $25aud per war bond. I think there’s eight war bonds now? That’s a full day’s income, and you still need to collect medals to unlock the contents of the warbond.
Edit: You all don’t need to explain this to me, I’m aware of the options for getting super credits. None of that changes how I feel about the game and that I’m losing interest because of it.
But you don’t “need” to unlock them all on the day of release, there is no FOMO component, they don’t disappear after a month.
And if you play enough to unlock them faster than they can get them out, you definitely have the time to grind the 1000SC to unlock them.
I’m definitely experiencing FOMO with the warbonds I don’t have. I don’t have the time to play/grind or the inclination to pay for them, so I am missing out. There’s three warbonds that I don’t have and sure I’ll eventually get them maybe but right now I’m missing out. Being able to unlock things is a big part of a game to me. I’m not dedicated enough to HD2 to skip the other games I want to play in order to get the unlocks. The whole process is lowering my interest in the game. I paid for it, I want to use the new toys that get released with it. If I were to buy it today, I’d be so far behind I’d feel short-changed in what I got access to.
It’s by far the least scummy of all online shooters.
I still have multiple to unlock and I have no issue paying for them. I have way more money than time to play.
Have to disagree. The war bonds have been some of the easiest to pay with in game currency compared to games like cod where their cod points feel next to worthless.
If you are netting very few credits per hell dive, you may be playing with those that don’t need them or playing bots, or a newly released content. Farming on level 1 will often get you with like minded folk, especially before a war bonds release. Farming is quick when you realize you don’t have to extract, just abort to ship.
1000 super credits are easily farmed just by doing missions. Do low level missions, race to the poi’s with the car, rinse repeat.
Fun? No. But you said farming so this is it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
By just playing the game for little over a week, so no farming, just playing, i’ve gathered 700 sc.
The medals are easily gathered doing level 5 and up missions and completing your personal orders. And taking part in the majors of course.
All that stuff is great if you’ve the time. I’ve got maybe 1-2 hours a week for the game.
Here the thing, if you only play 1-2 hours a week you barely have enough time to get a good load out figured out. Why don’t you just enjoy the game as is, when you have 40 hours in the game you should have unlocked a battle pass. It’s how games are monetized now. Enjoy the content available to you or fork up the cash. Welcome to 2025 we all hate it here.
If you play 1-2 hours a week you probably haven’t even unlocked the free stuff yet, or got meaningful upgrades. The new guns are not that great. I use the same shotgun from day 1. Same OG kit. The game plays fine without the BPs. The game gives you free access to BP. The core game itself is very fun to play and the rewards come pretty naturally.How is this an issue?
But then, warbonds aren’t necessary to play the game…
If you don’t have the time to read a book,watch a movie or play a game you should not start it.
I’m over 50, like you only have a few hours, i have a tremendous backlog of games i just have to play and a family to provide for. (mechwarrior clans is the first one which comes to mind but i have dozens)
But i came back for this event. You miss nothing. Every weapon you can “buy” does not really alter the game or changes anything. The standard liberator is still one of the very best primaries.
Ignoring the part about the super credits and fomo stuff, the money confuses me. Is regional pricing so different that you’re paying an additional $10 AUD compared to US and EU pricing? Additionally, $25 AUD as a full day’s income? Even a low hour, part time job earns way more than that. I feel like your situation might not be financially compatible with buying things like that, I’d cheat or pirate if it’s that important to you. $10 USD is not much for DLC, and while I strongly dislike purchasable gameplay mechanics in games, it’s supporting the continued development and it isn’t egregious. $10 is a burger, or a coffee, and I’m saying this as someone well below the poverty line.
ChocobofangirlThey meant buying all eight, which is funky to me since a day’s income for me is more like $120 CAD.
I’m hoping after we beat back the squids the devs give us another free warbond. That should hopefully bridge the gap for new or players who cannot spend money on the game.
It’s 15 AUD, not 25.
As for myself. I play maybe on average 2-3 missions per day.
So 70 ish missions per month. Collect an average of 10sc per mission. That’s 700sc + the 300 you get from the previous warbond.
That sounds very reasonable to me for an average playtime of 1h per day.
That’s nothing new.
Gamers who don’t know any programming, or at most have made a little script themselves. Love to bring out the old “just change one line of code”, “just add this model” to alter something in a game.
They literally do not understand how complex systems become, specially in online multiplayer games. Riot had issues with their spaghetti code, and people were crawling over eachother to explain how “easy” it would be to just change an ability. Without realizing that it could impact and break half a dozen other abilities.
See: Destiny and Telesto.
nfreakIn the wake of all the layoffs and such I don’t know if any former employees have (as vaguely as possible) discussed the codebase yet. It seems like such an absolute nightmare.
Even if you’re an actual software dev, it’s still pretty much impossible to guess how much work something is without knowing the codebase intimately.